“Cancer Bingo,” 2018

I was diagnosed with breast cancer on November 21, 2017. Three days later my father died of Glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer. This was his second cancer. The first was when I was seven, a non-Hodgkins lymphoma near his heart. We had not spoken much about cancer during my life. Even though my father was sick from chemotherapy, his hair fell out, and he was in and out of the hospital. I remember a sense of dread on the weekends, souring my stomach and gripping my throat. But I don’t remember talking about it. I didn’t even know what that feeling meant. My father kept working, smiling (when he wasn’t angry), not saying a word about what was happening to his body. I grew up with a silent fear of disease and dying. I didn’t know what that feeling meant. I learned to lean on my skills of perfectionism and performance, to shield myself from any reminder that I was an imperfect human. I was pretty good at it: top grades, perfect attendance, a people pleaser. I smiled just like my dad did. But inside, by high school, I was battling depression, panic and anxiety. No one knew. Just like I didn’t know about my dad’s feelings. We were really good at hiding (except on the days we weren’t, when it all came tumbling out. Until we buttoned it back up inside again.)

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Then came the day, the call, the news, that I too had cancer. I couldn’t hide from it. And I needed to talk about it. To process it. To understand it. To understand my feelings toward it, this invader into my body. I needed to determine what my cancer meant to me, in relation to the life I had lived before and what I could do now. So, I started to write. A lot. And I discovered I could give my experience with cancer a shape, with letters and words and spaces around words. With statements and questions. With specificity and generality. With poetry.